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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#601

Post by aksss »

mc32 wrote: post #205
jedberg wrote: post #168

This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?

They are consumer oriented. Companies scaled up their Box instances, so they are likely doing well. But Dropbox never really had the Corp customer. And with people having access to Box, why would they bother with Dropbox?

We see a lot of SMBs using Dropbox and have rarely encountered Box out in the wild. In both cases, they are often converting over to OneDrive - the Office Suite is still a very, very strong play in that most companies need/prefer it to alternatives, and since OneDrive is bundled the question inevitably gets asked, "why am I paying for DropBox if I have OneDrive/SharePoint included in this cost over here?". No good answer, really. I mean there are things that DropBox does better, but for a lot of businesses those strengths aren't valuable enough to pay the premium.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#602

Post by angrygoat »

Spooky23 wrote: post #506
thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession. There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an i…

> and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.

Yeah, this. I've found myself drifting over to OneDrive for personal use; it's pretty good at least on macOS, and Dropbox is just one-more-thing running all of the time.

But also, almost every time I log into their service I get popups bugging me to upgrade, it happened just now. I pay ~ $100/yr at the moment and I guess I've been too lazy to eliminate that expense by moving everything to one provider. Today might be the day to change that.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#603

Post by patrickthebold »

greatgirl wrote: post #529
jwr wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of g…

I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users? I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.

I've been wishing someone would make 'VC for non-profits'. It would essentially be a charity. Not a 'give money away' charity, just a 'below market rate returns' charity.

The point being to help finance someone making a self sustaining product.

So customers get a product, workers get a salary, 'investors' (doners really) break even.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#604

Post by ulfw »

Dropbox hasn't innovated in years and when they did they went into the wrong direction. I'm an existing subscriber for many years and will be dropping off when my subscription runs out in May. For an app that does one thing and one thing only, they sure are sloooooow in developing something. Case in point: Dropbox is still not native on ARM Mac. For god sake even Microsoft Office is and Adobe Lightroom. Not exactly small apps from small companies.

There's so much that could be done with storage. I have 50GB of images taken over the last 20 years. Do I really have to upload them to Dropbox file sync (I like to keep original files) AND to Apple/Google Photos just in order to be able to see them nicely on a mobile device. Yea the dropbox app kind of allows it, but it's a mediocre experience and not very fast either. Dropbox dropped the end customer, but also didn't really get big in Enterprises (who often run a homogenous ecosystem, e.g. based on Microsoft or Google and thus just upgrade to Onedrive/Google Drive). So then... who is the core audience? Is it big enough? Is it served well with existing offerings?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#605

Post by RachelF »

rland wrote: post #548
aeturnum wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google give…

There's a very easy precedent for this. Just widen anti-trust. Back when we actually imagined that government could stand up to powerful companies, we dealt with the Railroads with the tools of anti-trust. The situation was almost comically similar: + New, hyped technology; + Which received huge capital investment from newly printed money; + And which lent itself to a natural monopoly; + Which crushed competitors; +…

It is very hard for DropBox to compete against the free file storage offerings like Google Drive.

iCloud and OneDrive are integrated into the operating system now too, too.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#606

Post by srfvtgb »

aeturnum wrote: post #309
avrionov wrote: post #299

Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because…

There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google give…

Users lose out as well when they end up with products like Microsoft Teams.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#607

Post by dannyw »

avrionov wrote: post #299

Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because…

It doesn’t take thousands of engineers to build Dropbox. WhatsApp had 11 engineers.

Be scrappy, and don’t buy the expensive “your success is measured by your fundraising” trap.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#608

Post by simonh »

roughly wrote: post #596
simonh wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing wrong with buying competitors or offering lower prices by themselves. That’s fine. The problem with railroads is they impose a heavy cost on society by occupying a lot of territory. Railroads are noisy, polluting, obstruct highways and other transport and infrastructure. Every town wants a railway, but no town wants two competing mutually redundant railways providing the same service with two sets of…

> Twitter and Facebook for eg. They don’t impose a cost on the public in the way railways do either. That's an interesting take after the last couple years...

I understand what you mean, but I have a natural aversion to blaming the messenger. We're all personally responsible for what we say and do.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#609

Post by sokoloff »

greatgirl wrote: post #529
jwr wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of g…

I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users? I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.

As a mid-30s engineer, one evening I went to my VP of Engineering and suggested that we could be a lot more profitable if we cut back to half our staffing levels and concentrated on excelling at just our core product. She smiled politely and told me we had much brighter future than that.

As a late 40s VP at that same company, we’re about 25x the revenue and a greater ratio than that of free cash flow, employ far more people, and serve far more customers. That’s not in any way sad.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#610

Post by aksss »

weeboid wrote: post #211
jjoonathan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope not. Every vertical company wants my files locked in their walled garden, but I want my files to be horizontally portable. This is a fight where it's nice to have a $10B company in your corner.

In the near future, storage will be a home appliance, with networking and command-and-control. As simple to use as a microwave, unlimited storage with service plans similar to changing water filters.

and here I was thinking that in the near past that's what I used to do (storage appliance, networked, remote accessible).
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